The Exchange: Henry Finder

The New Yorker’s new humor anthology, “Disquiet, Please!,” was co-edited by our editor-in-chief, David Remnick, and editorial director, Henry Finder. We recently sat down with Finder, who graciously took the time to answer some of our questions.

If you had to be trapped on a desert island with one humor writer, living or dead, whom would you choose?

Personally, Ian Frazier. But S. J. Perelman, in the history of the magazine—well, you couldn’t do any better than him.

What do you find most compelling about humor writing?

Will Smith was nominated for an Oscar for his role in “The Pursuit of Happyness.” But many actors could have done that role just as well. On the other hand, what he did in his comedy, “Hitch,” very few other actors could have done. His charm and wit in that movie were quite remarkable. But no one was ever going to nominate him for an Oscar for that role. We have a prejudice against humor. And that’s equally true for humor writers. Did you read Zadie Smith’s piece for the Winter Fiction Issue, in which she discussed coming from a family that had a great deal of appreciation for comedy and famous comedians? I read that with a sense of recognition. My older brothers especially were comedy connoisseurs. I grew up in an environment that delighted in the deft comedic situation.

How did you and David begin the daunting process of choosing which essays to include in “Disquiet, Please!”?

First, we gathered the pieces we liked and spread them across a big table. We asked ourselves, “What goes together?” We realized that we liked a lot of show-business pieces and a lot of family pieces. And then we looked at where we had overlapping themes and tried to choose those that best represented the various categories we wanted to include.

How did you determine the order of the essays?

We considered which pieces would be fun to read in proximity. We also took into consideration that you don’t want to read a piece by a demented narrator where you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and then to follow that with one of droll commentary. Eventually, we decided to compile all of the pieces with unreliable narrators into their own section, which we titled “Song of Myself.”

Did you and David have any heated debates over which essays to include?

For the most part, David and I deferred to each other’s strong passions. But we obviously didn’t have room for all the pieces we liked, so we tried to balance the anthology with pieces from the great humorists like S. J. Perelman as well as those from younger, fresh voices.

Yes, I noticed that you included quite a few up-and-coming writers.

We did. When there was a choice between an older, better known writer and a younger, less familiar writer, we often chose the younger one.

Would your friends and family describe you as funny?

(Pause.) We need to get the fact-checkers on that.

What was the last thing that made you laugh so hard you cried?

(Very long pause.) I once suggested to a friend that he keep a cry diary, making a note every time a film or a television show or a book moved him to tears. I wanted to determine what part of narrative makes us cry. My theory is that it isn’t what we think it is. I think sometimes it’s actually the moment of restraint, when a character holds back, when he falters. In a movie, say, when a son wants to tell his father he loves him, but doesn’t, and instead they exchange a look. I think it’s a displacement of pathos. It involves blockage. We misremember not only what makes us cry, but the precise moment when we begin to cry. We think it’s later in the narrative than it really is. I think memories of things that made us laugh are often similarly inaccurate. We’re unreliable reporters when it comes to the events in our lives that move us.

After hearing about how funny it was, a friend and I watched the 1974 movie “Blazing Saddles” for the first time recently. We were disappointed to find it painfully slow. In your research for the anthology, did you discover any essays that also hadn’t withstood the test of time?

That really is a slow movie, isn’t it? We found a few pieces like that. But I was surprised, too, because there were also pieces I would have expected to feel dated but that stood up very well, like Marshall Brickman’s essays. But longevity isn’t the only judge of merit. It doesn’t demerit a piece just because it isn’t meant for the ages.

Tell me about the anthology’s cover illustration. Whose idea was it to use that 1969 drawing by William Steig?

We came up with the Steig drawing ourselves; we collaborated. We liked the energy of it. It has an element of disquiet and surprise. Nasty surprise:

A nasty surprise in a sandwich, a drawing-pin caught in your sock, the limpest of shakes from a hand which you’d thought would be firm as a rock.

That’s the opening stanza of James Fenton’s poem “God.” He was a comedic poet.

Something we rarely acknowledge, the value of comedy in poetry.

Yes, and it’s our loss.

Your first collection of humor writings from the magazine, “Fierce Pajamas,” was published in November, 2001, just two months after September 11th. Now your second collection has arrived in bookstores on the heels of an economic recession. It would appear that you have a knack for timing these collections right when the country is most in need of laughter. Either that or every time you decide to publish a new humor anthology, you cause a catastrophe. What do you think of these coincidences?

There’s an old joke about an elderly man who’s on his deathbed. His wife is sitting at his bedside, and he says to her, “Sylvia, all these years you’ve been right here next to me. When we went bankrupt, you were there. When the cholera epidemic hit and I was sick in bed, you were there. Even the second time we lost everything, you were there, right by my side. And when I was given this terminal diagnosis, you were right beside me.” And then he lifts his chin and looks her straight in the eye, and says, “Sylvia, you’re bad luck!” I guess the same could be said about our anthologies.